t is sometime after advances in robotics and matter transportation have spread humanity to the stars. A reporter named Robert Bratenahl, covering the funeral of Stephen Byerley, the venerated first president of the Galactic Federation, recognizes one of the mourners as the reclusive Dr. Susan Calvin, a pioneer in robotics long rumored to have been romantically involved with Byerley. Driven to discover the true
relationship between Calvin and Byerley, the reporter defies laws regulating media intrusion on private lives to
track down Calvin and learn the secret that bound her to the great leader.
Along the way, he learns how closely Calvin's life was tied to the history of robotics. He learns of Robbie, the robot nanny who cared for Susan when she was a child. He learns of Herbie, a robot accidentally created with the ability to read minds. He learns of Lenny, an apparently defective robot created with the mind and the personality of a child. Along the way, he patches together a deep and contradictory portrait of Susan Calvin, an abrasive and lonely woman with a deep humanity she was
able to reveal only to the robots she developed and perhaps loved.
Growing obsessed with the subject, risking his career to discover the truth, Bratenahl finally manages to get an interview with Calvin herself ... and learns that the story is so great it might, in fact, be too dangerous to tell ...
A masterpiece that almost was
It's all too easy to see why Hollywood passed on producing Ellison's version of the seminal Isaac Asimov stories. The screenplay is challenging, imaginative, sprawling, cynical, heartfelt and, above all, intelligent. There are no heroes running from expanding fireballs, no spaceships shooting laser beams as they go whoosh in deep space. It tells the story of an abrasive, unattractive heroine who changes the world without ever achieving any form of happiness for herself, and it ends with a troubling and perhaps unanswerable question. It's a screenplay designed to expand the mind, that
at the time it was written would have strained the technical and budgetary considerations of any studio. Ellison's introduction to the published version establishes also that the people making the decisions at that time weren't capable of understanding it; the even-more-timid movie moguls of today probably wouldn't give it a look. It has to join the piles of great unproduced screenplays that sit on shelves while stuff like Dude, Where's My Car? shows up at the malls.
And yet, what a screenplay! Although the unhappiness of Susan Calvin is already present in Asimov's original tales, Ellison understood that a straight adaptation of Asimov's intellectually intriguing, but visually static, tales wouldn't work onscreen. So he made the framing sequence a compelling story in its own right, depicting a future filled with wonders that has nevertheless left behind some of the people who created it. He gave full attention to even the most minor supporting characters, filled it with great lines, and drew a strong narrative thread that makes readers feel both the heartbreak of Calvin's life and the magnitude of her accomplishment.
Ellison makes no secret that the structure, and the ambition, were lifted from Citizen Kane. We may never know if it would have met a filmmaker capable of realizing it at anywhere approaching the intended level of accomplishment. Even the scary advances in special-effects technology that have revolutionized filmmaking in the last few years, which might make it easier to film these days, still chain imagination to the realities of the bottom line. But one thing is clear. He shot for far, far more than a mere excuse to sell popcorn.
